Disclaimer: Reclusively not mine.

A/N: Written for Nuitsongeur as her Secret Santa gift over on ygodrabble. Pre-canon AE – i.e. the characters are both younger than their first appearances in canon. Also, FFN's new habit of removing spaces and running sentences and words together is REALLY annoying!

Stand Together, Fall Alone

© Scribbler, December 2011

Kisara rose to consciousness slowly, like driftwood from a sunken vessel slowly washing up a beach. With the tenacity of the tide, her eyelids pulled back in increments. She stared at the ceiling and cold fear washed through her. She had been outside before. She remembered staggering as lack of food and water finally took their toll. She remembered crashing down towards the ground, though not hitting it. She remembered the night sky above her. She did not remember a cave.

Something moved to her left. She allowed her head to tilt that way. Weak as she was, it was all she could manage. A figure crouched over a fire at the cave's entrance. It wafted a cloth to dispel the smoke, but stopped and turned to look at her as if she had made a noise.

"You're awake."

Kisara said nothing. She had been in this terrible land long enough to understand most of the most common language, though some of the people she had been sold to spoke their own dialect. Those could be so thick even the slavers had trouble understanding them. This person spoke with a lilt, but the words were clear.

The person left the fire and came to crouch next to her. Part of her wanted to run. Another, larger part just wished she had died already. Her efforts to get home had failed once again. Was she destined to stay forever in this hot, ridiculous country, and never again she her beloved ocean?

"Here." The person slipped a hand under her back and levered her into a sitting position with surprising strength. "Drink." A gourd of fresh water was pressed to her chapped lips. She drank rather than choke or waste it. A thin trickle ran down her chin. The stranger wiped it away with the pad of one calloused thumb.

"Thank you," she croaked eventually.

The stranger shrugged. "The desert is a harsh mistress."

Kisara dropped her eyes. She knew that all too well. Her own people had no equivalent word for 'desert' and sand had always been wet and freezing stuff found on the beach as they helped lug the boats up the shore before storms hit and smashed them to bits. A pang of extreme longing went through her; she so wanted to go back to the hut she shared with her father and brothers, to taste cured caribou and drink mead instead of the things she was given to eat here.

"You're not from this place," her rescuer said, pointing to the scabs around her wrists and ankles. "You haven't been free for long."

"I'm still not free," she replied. She wouldn't be until she got home.

Her rescuer nodded with the certainty of experience.

Kisara waited a moment before saying, "Thank you."

"You said that already."

"No, I mean for saving me."

Another shrug.

"Why did you do it?" She wondered whether she was going to be sold on again, or whether this stranger had more insidious designs. Her exhausted muscles tensed with the memory of slavers coming to sample their goods. If this stranger tried anything, she was too weak to fight back. Her father had ingrained into his children a few short but important lessons: always respect the ocean, defend your family above all else and choose death before dishonour. Maybe now was the time she enacted the last one.

Her rescuer stared at her for a long moment. "As I said, the desert is a harsh mistress. Outsiders like us need to protect ourselves if we're to survive her."

Kisara looked at his pale hair and the livid scar crisscrossing his cheek. She wondered whether this was another escaped slave, taken from his home against his will. What was his story? "I suppose so," she said softly.

Fin.